Friday, November 18, 2011

Snow Bunny

Hello everyone!

Tonight I'm going to use some of my favorite new products to show you one of my favorite winter-inspired looks, the Snow Bunny! This look is characterized by glowy skin, flushed cheeks, and silvers and blues on the eyes. What a Snow Bunny is NOT is a Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer inspired look with a chapped red nose like I have had this week. I will share all my fun tricks to help you combat redness and look like the pretty lady you are!

Before I walk you through the makeup items, I want to share some of the awesome skin care I have been using lately that have helped me achieve this glowy look. All of these awesome products were found at my local Target store, and each item I purchased was between $5-10. I went out on a limb trying a brand I have never tried before, and it ended up being one of the cheapest, and greatest hauls I have ever done! I absolutely can't wait to try more of their skin care and try some of their makeup too! Have you tried Boots before? What do you think?

Boots Original Beauty Formula Skin Tonic Damask Rose

I am super picky on what I will use for skin tonic/clarifying lotion because I know how badly some of them dry your skin out. This one comes in a huge glass bottle which is fun to display in your bathroom, and not only does it make your skin feel sparkly clean, but also hydrates. wowza!

Boots Expert Sensitive Hydrating Serum

This serum I have been using day and night underneath my moisturizer, and let me tell you it's wonderful. I have been searching high and low for a facial serum that hydrates. Lots of moisturizers have hydrators, but I love serums because they are basically just a highly concentrated version of your moisturizer, and a quick and easy way to inject a ton of moisture into your skin all at once.

Boots Original Beauty Formula Skin Balm

This stuff reminds me of Vaseline in a cute tin. I have been using this on all my cracked skin on my face. I get horribly red skin around my nose from blowing my nose so much so I have been applying this to my nose area at night for extra moisture.

Boots Botanics Intensive Moisture Mask

I would compare this product to Clinique's Moisture Surge Extra Thirsty Skin Relief. This stuff is great, and comes in a squeeze tube. Especially for the price, I would absolutely use this over the Moisture Surge. Sometimes with my expensive products, I tend to get stingy since I don't want to run out and shell out more money to replace them. This stuff I could justify squeezing out a whole bottle a week and repurchasing. It feels wonderful on my skin and I've never seen results like this from a product that is this inexpensive.

Boots Original Beauty Formula Overnight Skin Cream Bergamot

This stuff is a great overnight cream, and it feels rich without being heavy, which is hard to find in a night cream. It has a scent similar to the Rose Tonic from this same line. It also comes in the most adorable glass jar. Once again, I've never found something of this price point that does the stuff this product does for my skin. I wake up and my skin is fresh and glowy! Love this stuff!

I might add before I purchased these products, I stood in the aisle in Target FOREVER because I was using my "totalbeauty" app on my Smartphone to research how good these were....almost everything in their entire line received between 9 and 10 stars, out of 10 on the review sites. That is practically unheard of!

Anyways, let me walk you through my skin prep:

Because of my awful allergies and the cold I had to boot this week, I have had some awfully sore, puffy eyes with huge dark circles. To make matters worse my cheekbones are high, causing my under eye area to be more shadowy anyways. Not gonna lie, my dark circles were a bear to cover up this week, but I ended up finding products to cover them that were so great, they actually looked better than they do on a normal day!

Ok well, maybe they're not THAT bad, but you get the picture. I have to work extra hard to cover those puppies up. My two go to products this week for under eye puffiness have been:

Clinique All About Eyes Serum De-Puffing Eye Massage

This product is basically a diluted version of their eye cream, in a huge tube with a metal ball on the end. The metal roller on the top is sooooo soothing to your skin. It feels great on allergy eyes!

My favorite part about this is the twisty top that lets out just a little bit of the formula at once, and the sponge tip applicator that feels oh so soft on my skin.

A few other products I tried that were meh:

Neutrogena Healthy Skin Brightening Eye Perfector SPF 25 in Light

I don't mind this product, but I didn't see nearly the results I got from the Maybelline. Also, I'm not a big fan of the paintbrush applicator. I will definitely get use out of this until it runs out, since who CAN'T use another product that defends against dark circles. Will I repurchase? Probably not.

Estee Lauder Idealist Cooling Eye Illuminator

Did I love this product when I first gave it a shot? Yes! However, at the $58 price point and the tiny little 0.5 oz tube, this stuff better give me under eye botox, and that it did not. It didn't even have a little metal rolley ball to cool my eyes off! It did make them feel super silky, but I thought the price tag was super lame. And all it really did was make your eyes feel super soft, but didn't do much to conceal despite coming in different shades.

**I also feel compelled to tell you all that there was a great looking product by Garnier out that promised to help a lot of my dark under eye circled problems, but I couldn't bring myself to buy it. Why? Because Jessica had an absolutely horrible experience with Garnier's hair care last year. She will be blogging about it soon, but essentially it ruined her hair and she had to get several inches chopped off (basically it would have been enough to donate to Locks For Love except it was all completely damaged and discolored). So.... sometimes a company messes up big time and it's very hard to win back customer loyalty.

Ok, Snow Bunnies...Here are the awesome products I used to achieve my look!